I am always amazed to listed to talking heads and politicians talking about Israel's right to defend itself. Are they willfully ignorant or just stupid? Hizbullah has never invaded Israel while Israel had invaded Lebanon several times and, from the early days of Zionism, Israel has seen the northern boundry of Israel being the boundry of ancient israel: the Litani River in Lebanon. Israel occupied Lebanon for 18 years. They invaded in 1982. When they stayed Hizbullah was formed to drive the Israelis out, which they did in 2000. Hizbullah is there to keep the Israeli's from invading, which Israel has been planning for this past year. It didn't work in 1982 and it won't work now. Israel is the master of pretending to be the victim when they are the agressor. It's a pretense that only the American TV watching public swallows. Anyway, Helena Cobban is back. She knows many of the players on both sides and lived in Lebanon during the civil war. She is always a must read. Now she is a really truly must read.

Dimensions of the Lebanon crisis
by Helena Cobban

Note 1: Israel getting bogged down (already) in Lebanon The veteran Israeli peace activist and former Member of Knesset Uri Avnery had it completely right when he wrote on August 5, We are conquering South Lebanon as flies 'conquer' fly-paper. Generals present maps with impressive arrows to show how Hizbullah is being pushed north. That might be convincing - if we were talking about a front-line in a war with a regular army, as taught in Staff College. But this is a different war altogether. In the conquered area, Hizbullah people remain, and our soldiers are exposed to attacks of the kind in which Hizbullah has excelled from its first day.

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Entire Lebanese family killed in Israeli attack on hospital
by Robert Fisk

An attack on a hospital, the killing of an entire Lebanese family, the seizure of five men in Baalbek and a new civilian death toll - 468 men, women and children - marked the 22nd day of Israel's latest war on Lebanon.

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Slaughter in Qana
By Robert Fisk

Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre. Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.

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It's about annexation, stupid!

Officially, Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon is an act of self-defense against Hezbollah's threat, aimed at creating a security buffer zone until the arrival of a "multinational force with an enforcement capability". But increasingly, as the initial goal of a narrow strip of only a few kilometers has now been extended up to the Litani River deep in Lebanon, the real motives behind Israel's invasion are becoming crystal-clear. It's about (de facto) annexation, stupid. This is a war to annex a major chunk of Lebanese territory without necessarily saying so, under the pretext of security buffer and deterrence against future attacks on Israel.

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"You reach a place where you look at life like it's nothing."
By Dahr Jamail

Walking into the scene of the massacre yesterday in Qana felt like entering a bottomless pit of despair. A black whole of sadness, regardless of the fact that the bodies of the women, 37 young children, the elderly, and what few men were there had been removed. Mohammad Zatar, the 32-year-old Lebanese Red Cross volunteer I spoke with down in Tyre, after we'd been to Qana, described the scene and the feelings better than I can. "I worked to rescue people after the first Qana massacre in 1996," he told me as we stood in front of the Red Cross headquarters. "But this one was so much worse. It was the ages. So many baby kids, unlike last time. Four months to 12 years. Only six adult bodies! Only 8 injured survivors. The rest -- all kids. There were no scratches on the bodies because they were all buried in the rubble. It was a bad scene."

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Aid lifeline broken after Israelis hit highway

Israeli aircraft struck deep into Lebanon yesterday, killing at least 33 Syrian Kurdish farm workers and destroying four bridges on a key aid route leading north from Beirut.

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Hizbullah's attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon

As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created this crisis. Israel is defending itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism. Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel's silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict. Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.

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The Meat Grinder
by Billmon

So, after much indecision and trepidation, the Israeli War Cabinet has decided to step up the pace of the IDF's slow-motion invasion of southern Lebanon. In a major expansion of its ground offensive, Israel has decided to send troops deeper into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah fighters and secure the territory until a multinational force is deployed there, senior officials said Tuesday. The Israelis are doing this with all the dash and elan of a man sticking his hand down a garbage disposal -- one that has already claimed a couple of fingers.

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The Portmanteau Resolution
by Billmon

It's difficult to know exactly what to make of the proposed UN Security Council resolution the Anglos and the French have finally managed to hammer out -- in part because it's really two resolutions jammed together one.

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